Oral Histories

Our New Oral History Project: First Fruits!

We are delighted to present the first interview in our new oral history project. This project aims to capture the experience of Cleveland Park residents with a focus on the 1960s and ’70s. We are particularly interested in Cleveland Park in the context of a changing Washington and changing American society; women’s lives and careers; architects and artists in the neighborhood; and the “prehistory” of historic preservation before Cleveland Park became a historic district—but the interviews will range over their subjects’ lives and careers.

Interview transcripts will be archived as part of the Records of the Cleveland Park Historical Society at the Kiplinger Library of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., and will be freely available to the public both here and via HSW’s library website.

The first interview of the new project was with George Idelson. Click the link at right to read his oral history. Next up this winter: transcripts of interviews with Lou Stovall and Clare Tighe. Stay tuned!

George Idelson, now in his 90s, has lived in Washington since 1950 and in Cleveland Park since 1967. He has a long history of leadership in community organizations, particularly on preservation issues. In this oral history conducted in November 2017 by Abigail Porter, George reflects on what’s changed and what hasn’t over fifty years in Cleveland Park.

Oral Histories of Cleveland Park Residents in Other Online Projects

As our new project gets under way, we are eager to share oral histories of Cleveland Park residents that have been completed as part of other projects and are freely available online. If you know of other oral histories out there that we should link to,please email and let us know.

1984 Oral Histories

These oral histories were collected in 1984 by students at John Eaton as part of a project headed by Rives Carroll. They were published in a booklet called Cleveland Park Voices: A Social History. A year later, when CPHS was founded, our newsletter inherited the name Voices.

These oral histories are arranged in order of the date their subjects moved to Cleveland Park. The files linked here represent the first half of those in the booklet, those whose time in Cleveland Park began between 1907 and 1965.

The earliest residents remember a time when Cleveland Park was still almost entirely rural. Sledding is a major theme; Philip Stone remembers sledding down Macomb Street from the 3500 block all the way across Connecticut Avenue! Elizabeth Faulkner remembers growing up in the Rosedale Farmhouse. She was the daughter of Queenie Coonley, patron of Frank Lloyd Wright who moved to Rosedale in 1917. Mary Ellen Grogan remembers when Ordway Street wasn’t paved all the way through from Connecticut to Wisconsin, and Helen Hayes was a John Eaton student.

The interviews include the proprietors and staff of beloved neighborhood institutions: the late, lamented University Pastry Shop, which was on Wisconsin just south of Macomb (Julius Andrascek); Roma Restaurant (Bobby Abbo); Sullivan’s (Thomas Sullivan); Friendship Florist (Philip Caruso); and the Safeway that used to be where the Brookville Supermarket is now (Wally Valentini).

Residents who remember the war years describe a neighborhood in some danger of being deemed “blighted” in the aftermath of the Depression. People who wanted to buy in Cleveland Park paid sub-prime rates. Many houses were turned into group homes as World War II brought a huge housing shortage to Washington, and there were so few children that John Eaton was in danger of being closed.

The description of the neighborhood by people who were kids here in the ’50s will be familiar to people who grew up in the Cleveland Park of the ’60s and ’70s, too – walking to school by scrambling over the banks and under the boxwoods of Rosedale; shopping at Murphy’s; eating old-school Chinese food at the Moon Palace.